The independent PLM research and consulting authority CIM Data have published a very interesting commentary on PLM in the medical device industry and linked that to Minerva’s Medical Device PLM solution.

Paper or file folder-based processes often used to manage documentation slow time to market, make data hard to manage, and make effective risk management, verification, validation, and full traceability difficult to support

Minerva’s Medical Device solution, based on Aras Innovator, helps companies develop and support products by structuring data and processes using industry best practices to speed time to market while managing risk

So do you work in a medical device company that is or have been experienced challenges with regards to a change management process that can create baselines that encompass everything from deliverables in your project, to the status of your DHF and DMR, your BOM structure, documentation and everything else that is a part of your Product Record, then read the commentary.

Bombardier RCS have decided to work together with Minerva and implement Aras Innovator for Enterprise PLM in order to stramline process across multiple sites.

The main reasons for choosing Aras Innovator is the speed of which solutions can be implemented and that the flexibility of Aras Innovator makes them confident that it is felxible enough to address the requirements they have today, and also the ones the will have in the future.

After having used Aras for some time, and a couple of succesfully implemented projects together with Minerva, Airbus have decided to expand the foot print of Aras to an Enterprise wide solution in Engineering Business Processes for more than 30,000 users.

About a year ago Minerva started productizing our knowledge as add-on solutions to Aras Innovator.

Since Product Development in order to bring out standard products, rather than developing solutions for our customers, was something new to us, we did not have any tools to support the Product Management part of the process. We needed to capture and share ideas, prioritize them. Link approved ideas to products. We needed to link products and bundles together, and have a common tool of communicating status of developing projects and roadmaps for running products.

We looked at a lot of different solutions for this, and we tested a handful on live projects. All of them had some good features that supported parts of process, but none of them could support the entire process from capturing the idea, through development of the product, to support of customers and capturing and developing enhancements.

As our product portfolio continued to grow, it got more and more difficult to structure all the information and ensure that everybody involved got access to the information they needed. It started to be a combination of excel spreadsheets, word documents and different web tools.

Finally I had to do something, so I skyped one of our technical consultants (David) and explained the problem. He suggested that we should just do it in Aras!

And we started working on it during the Skype session. I shared my screen and started drawing the data model, and while I was drawing David set up an Aras system to solve the issues. After 1 hour and 28 minutes (!) we had a working system, and after another 2 hours I had data in the system and could start working with it. This of course gave some ideas for some additional functionality. So I skyped David again, and 12 minutes later it was in the system!

To me, this really underlines the strength and flexibility of Aras Innovator. In less than a day I had a system completely designed to fit my requirements with my data in it. Of course not a 100% finished solution, but close enough that I could start using it right away. And, as we continue to expand and develop the solution in small sprints it keeps getting more and more functionality and covering more and more of the process. I just wish we would have done it from the beginning, and saved ourselves a lot of frustration and wasted time.